Reigning in Data (Part 2 of 3)

(Originally published in Feb 2017 at Aarki.com)

Part 2: Organize, Iterate and Challenge

Proper advertising is crucial to the success of any app marketing campaign. Too many mobile ads, the wrong kind, can drive away potential high lifetime value (LTV) users. Showing the right ad, with the right creative and to the right user is the key to success. This is what Aarki’s creative team strives to achieve. And we do this through a methodical process which we’d like to share with you stage by stage:

Research

A successful campaign always starts out with proper planning and research. The first step is understanding the audience and the app itself. After our creative team dives deep into the essence of the app, they compose an inventory of all the assets and previous campaigns.

Strategize

Before starting to build the creatives, it is necessary to think over the creative strategy, i.e. to understand the best ways to communicate the intention of the app. What is your way in? How do you get your point across quickly? How do you easily attract the users?

For Social Casino apps for example, this maybe to present the slot reel multipliers using elements that make the app unique. The presence of characters and recognizable figures in a game can be the key to success in attracting and acquiring new users.

Organize

Now that we have a plan and a strategy, it’s time to get organized. We create a list of all the assets we will need to test, like CTA color, CTA copy - “free install”, or “download now”. By combining these assets, we get clear understanding not only on how each asset performs but also are able to see how they perform as a whole. For Social Casinos, for instance, this would include the different characters or slot themes.

Build

The next stage is proceeding with building the creatives basing it on the plan, adding our own creative flair and a secret sauce to make it standout and be the best possible creative. Depending on the scale of the campaign, we may have more than 10 creatives running simultaneously. With Multivariate, it is possible to expand that number even more and test every detail if needed. However, our experience shows that launching with 3 to 4 creatives is enough to get sufficient data to inform you on your next step.

Analyse

Data is an integral part of the creative here at Aarki. We monitor every creative as if they were our kids playing in the park. We look at how they perform and wish them the best. Different metrics come into play such as CPI, CTR and other KPIs like ROI. CTR informs us if the creative has something that might appeal to clicks but maybe not to installs. CPI is what we use to guide us towards determining the best creative.

Iterate

There will always be a creative that performs better than the rest. We call this the “champion” creative. This champion creative tells us what direction to take for the next iterations. Maybe one of the strategies worked better; say Multipliers over Characters. Now we look at how to improve that champion. This set of new creatives we call “challengers”. We roll out these creatives and then monitor their performance as well.

Optimize

After doing multiple cycles of build, analyse and iterate we should be able to determine a clear winner. This is when our analytics team optimizes the campaign to help us make the overall performance even better.